Program Description

Welcome Message

After using LibGuides for a year, we knew we needed to change our design. When we asked students if they used the guides, more than once we heard something like this: "I clicked on one once but it was too confusing. I didn't know what to do so I left."

Clearly improvements were needed. The content was good, but our overcrowded, text heavy design was preventing students from accessing it. Inspired by a design workshop by Nedda Ahmed of Georgia State, we performed reviews of other institutions' guides, performed individual usability testing, and in our most successful information gathering event, invited students to come to a participatory design workshop.

Paid in chocolate and strawberries, students drew their ideal guides, and the information we gathered from their contributions led to a total overhaul of our design that made access to information clearer, better looking, and much more in tune with the needs of our users.

My presentation will discuss my academic library’s (successful) transition from a consortial text reference model to an in-house model using LibAnswers’ SMS Module. I’ll focus on best practices for training, staffing, & marketing a text reference service and discuss how our patrons inspired us to combine text reference and roving reference to create a more responsive, point-of-need service. These experiences can help other libraries embarking on SMS reference or rethinking the role of text messaging and mobile/roving reference in their library’s suite of reference services.

Title:LibCal and the Open Workshop: Bolstering Attendance, One Registration at a Time

The Library & Learning Center Team began offering instructional webinars for nearly two years, but for the first several quarters we had very low (for some webinars, no) participation. In Fall Quarter, 2011, we utilized LibCal to offer a schedule and registration tool for students, and participation jumped significantly. During this presentation, we will share our approach to offering instructional webinars and using LibCal to maximize exposure and participation.

Imagine your students going from a Blackboard course to a research guide with just a click of a mouse! Pru will demonstrate how she teamed up with colleagues at Texas A&M University-San Antonio to enhance students’ experiences with getting research help. Learn how to embed JavaScript code as a page in Blackboard to direct students to the best LibGuide for the course they are doing research for. You can set this up so that if you have a course specific guide, i.e. HIST 4346: Texas History, you can send the students directly to that guide anytime they are in that course in Blackboard. If that is the only specific guide for history, then you can send students in all other history courses in Blackboard to a general history research guide. The base JavaScript and easy step-by-step instructions will be provided.

You do not need to be a techie to implement this for your institution!

Samford University uses LibAnalytics to close the Instruction loop. Stephanie will cover how she uses this system from Initial Instruction Request to Instruction Statistics to Post-Instruction Assessment.

Title:The Tipping Point: Increasing Library Service Usage among Students using Springshare Widgets.

In an effort to meet users at their point of need *and* promote our new LibChat service, we are offering Samford instructors the widget code to embed a customized LibChat window in each of their class pages. Lacking direct access to the instructors' Moodle accounts, we offered the next best thing in a LibGuide full of step-by-step instructions, video tutorials (for the visual learners), and the widget code itself. As part of a larger campaign called "Librarians on the Move: Here, There, & Everywhere", we are also offering code for embedding LibGuides and subject liaison profiles.

With the help of the LibCal turnkey solution, the Van Pelt and Opie Library at Michigan Technological University recently implemented a new self-administered group study room-booking system for undergraduate and graduate students. Though a powerful solution out-of-the-box, the LibCal solution offers many ways for administrators to fully customize it, integrating it with both the systems of the administrator's home institution, and with other Springshare products in ways that radically enhance UX (user experience). Our presentation will walk the user through our 5 week process of customizing LibCal and integrating it into our own systems, focusing specifically on how strong project management, usability testing, and an agile, iterative design process can help you quickly and efficiently increase the value to your users and stakeholders. During the presentation (and in the Springshare document share provided), we will offer specific examples of the project management documents, as well as the code we used to build our interfaces, as well as a list of links to simple but useful resources and tutorials which can can help you learn more about usability and UX design.

If you enjoyed SpringyCamp, chances are you will also like Springshare's Free Online Training Sessions! Check out our upcoming Training Sessions and register for free online!